Back in Hong Kong on August 20th and now I’m back blogging. I had a fantastic time in the UK with the family. Scarborough, Alton Towers, Light Water Valley, Birmingham, Cramlington and Carlisle. The kids enjoyed it more than me though

The fascinating thing is the amount of changes that I’ve noticed. I used to study in Birmingham about 14 years ago. This was the first time I went back with my wife to look at the place. I was gobsmacked.

The place had changed so much I was lost a lot of the times. Good job China Town is still there and my favorite restaurant, China Court. I always used to think that Hong Kong was very advanced until I went back to the UK. It seems that everything has changed so much.

Much more restaurants, huge shopping centres, internet cafes etc… Now imagine what would happen if everything had stayed the same? Would the country still be as attractive as it is now? Would tourists like it? Would people return?

The point I’m making is that continuous improvement is vital. Just like your marketing and your online business. You need to keep up with the trends otherwise you will be left behind. If I compare Birmingham to Newcastle (where I was born), I much prefer Birmingham. Newcastle has changed but not much.

Many marketers are creating videos with their products and salesletters. Are you doing the same and keeping up with the trend? Remember photos? It’s all digital now. What would happen if a shop owner still stuck to developing photos the old fashioned way and ignored the digital photo wave? Yes he’ll be out of business.

That’s something to think about for today.

By the way, it’s been about 9 days since I came back from the UK and I haven’t blogged till now. The reason? I lost the rhythm. As soon as the habit is broken for a while, you’ll lose the rhythm and it’s hard to get back. This is what happened to me. I hope I’ll be blogging again tomorrow.

I’m busy watching the Beijing Olympics over here in the UK and also traveling to different cities so I haven’t updated Traffic Beast much.  I’ve been to Alton Towers with the kids which was amazing. I never imagined I could walk a full 10 hours non-stop around the park.

As for the Beijing Olympics, I was absolutely stunned with the opening ceremony. Everyone was talking about it. Imagine having a product launch with something that can reach that level of excitement!

I’ll be back in Hong Kong on August 20th so busy will be normal then. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my month’s stay in the UK. Cheer your own country in the Olympics and have a fantastic time. I’ll be cheering on China and Hong Kong.

I’m in Newcastle Upon-Tyne in the UK now. The weather is excellent compared to Hong Kong. UK’s weather rules. A lot of people will think I’m nuts.

It’s been quite relaxing these few days. Funnily enough, I had a lot more time to think about things. Important things of course.

Things like, what tasks am I doing that are effecting my business. And what direction I should take etc…

I never had a chance to think like this in Hong Kong. Everything seems so rushed and I’m always so busy. Looking at the people in UK taking a more relaxed approach slowed me down considerably. I no longer feel so rushed during the day.

Good or bad?

Yes, internet marketing will come to a standstill

It’s 7:17am in Hong Kong now and I’m off to the airport in 10 mins time. I’ll be blogging from the UK for the next month!!!

Talk to you on Tuesday. I hope my broadband connection is OK at my mum’s.

I don’t recommend services, products or books much (apart from my own). I just read a book by Paul Hancox and it was brilliant. Worth every dollar I paid for it.

Oh by the way, slightly off topic, I’m going to the UK for 3.5 weeks!!! Woo hooo… One of the highlights will be meeting with one of my old friends from University. We were great buddies but never stayed in contact after our studies. I finally found him at Linked.com I love the internet.

During these 3.5 weeks, I’ll be thinking about the direction of my online business. I’ll probably change the look of traffic beast, have a mentoring/coaching service, release some new affordable products etc… But I want to do something that is different and explore other opportunities.

Back to Paul Hancox’s book. The book is called “Secrets of a 10 Percent Conversion Rate” and it’s an eye opener.

I’m halfway through the book (it’s around 127 pages) and I love it. Paul talks about improving conversion rates of websites to 10% and more. He’s talk bullshitting either. The strategies he talks about makes real sense.

There are several instances where Amazon.com and other big online stores are discussed why they consistently get 10% and more conversion rate of buyers.  Very interesting.

There are many sections in the book and my favortie section is about blogging (surprise, surprise). Paul discusses how to make a people addicted to your blog and how to create an effective blog presence. Excellent stuff.

Go and get your ten percent conversion rates today.

Millions of people want to have a blog and tell the whole world about their thoughts. I don’t know how many blogs are created daily but my guess is around 100,000. I don’t really know. I just know that it’s substantial daily number.

When you create a blog, you’ll have the urge of writing to it every day and keep at it, maybe for a week or so. After that you give up and your blog becomes one of the many zombie blogs out there.

Results is what motivates us. After blogging away for weeks and seeing no results, it pretty much kills the spirit.

This is why when you create a blog,  you must plan ahead. I mean detailed planning. This includes planning on what to write for the whole week at a sitting. Don’t try to blog a new post every day. Sometimes, you just don’t feel like doing it. You also need to plan how to be interesting.

Why would people want to visit your blog? Everyone reads a blog for 2 reasons:

1. They want to learn something from your blog

2. They find your blog interesting and entertaining.

That’s it. Nothing else. Just these 2 principles are enough for you to start creating a [tag-tec]successful blog[/tag-tec]. Stick with these 2 basic principles and it is inevitable, that you’ll get the recognition or money that you deserve from your blog.

Being “interesting” is the key here. Writing one boring post is enough to kill quite a few visitors. Not to mention missing out on the return rate of the visitors.

To speed up the success rate of your blog, you need a well designed blog that ranks well in the search engines, encourages user interaction, promotes itself in social networks etc… While all these features will help a blog considerably, you still need to provide good content and be interesting.

If you’re confident that your blogging can meet the above 2 criterias, then you can purchase your blog installation at http://www.blogsetupservice.net and just concentrate on blogging. Get the technical aspects of your blog handled by someone else.

Start a blog today to brand yourself, market your products and attract targeted visitors. Easier said than done especially if you have no technical experience in setting up blogs.

Today I launched a service, Blog Setup Service which provides [tag-tec]wordpress installation[/tag-tec] (the best blog platform on the market), configuration of essential plugins to rank well in search engines and attract visitors, PLUS training on how to blog properly.

Browsing around forums, I realised that a lot of people want to [tag-tec]start a blog[/tag-tec] but tend to go for the free web publishing tools such as blogsport and xanga and WordPress.com However, if the bloggers had a choice, they would prefer a blog on their own domain.

It’s much more cool to have a blog with your own domain and also your email addresses within your own domain. Additionally, your blog won’t be seen as something hosted free. It’s got its own individual place and that displays it as a more serious blog.

The problem most people come across when they start a blog is how to do it technically. I was surprised with the number of people who struggled with this and outsourced it to freelancers.

Installing plugins, when setting up a blog, takes the most amount of time in the overall process. You have to know what plugins to install and do the right configurations for them. Read my previous post How To Make Money Online With Blogs for the types of plugins you need. (By the way, the list is in no way complete).

The pain when comes when you’re trying to install some plugins for newer versions of WordPress and you find that they are no longer compatible.

In summary, Blog Set Up Service provides:

- installation of the latest wordpress software on your domain
- configuration of many plugins which makes your blog rank well in the search engines, attract traffic and better user interaction
- web hosting for 1 year
- training on how to blog, immediately after receiving your new blog. Includes videos and manuals
- 1 month support of the new blog

If you are serious with blogging, you no longer have excuses for using free web publishing tools. Get your own domain and establish yourself as a serious blogger. Start a blog today at http://www.blogsetupservice.net

Article Marketing is done by many people who ignore the keyword research part. The thought behind this is, the articles are distributed everywhere and our content will be seen by a lot of people. So as long as our content is good keyword research can be skipped.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Those will be the people who complain that article marketing does not work.

As a matter of fact, keyword research is essential for article marketing, websites and blogs. Basially all content that you put on the internet.

Content on the internet is being searched by the whole world via search engines. Everyone types in keywords of what they want to know in the search boxes and hopefully bring up relevant results to what they want to know.

The search engine brings up the search results based on the content of the webpages. So if you want to appear near the top of the search engines for particular words then you need to write articles that have those keywords in them. When the search engines see that you have the keywords in your content a few times along with other related keywords, they will consider your page relevant.

So for [tag-tec]article marketing[/tag-tec], you must think beforehand which keywords you are trying to rank for, and try to optimize your article for those keywords. Your article is going to waste if you haven’t done any keyword research for it. No one is going to find it on the search engines. You’re missing out on potential traffic.

As I mentioned last week, Google has added a great feature to its keyword research tool. It now has search numbers for the previous month for keywords.

Based on these results, you can tell if the long tail keywords you are targeting for, actually do get searched by your market. This is what every successful internet marketers do before they publish articles, website content or blog posts. They target main keywords and long tail keywords and hopefully the search engine will rank high for them.

To read more about using keyword research tools, here is an excellent post by Linda Bustos of www.getelastic.com She goes into detail on how to effectively use Google’s research tool for your website. Great Stuff.

The New Google Keyword Tool: How To Apply Keyword Research to Your ...
There are many free and paid keyword research tools out there, but until this announcement, none were able to provide Google-only data. But like Avinash Kaushik said last week in his Analytics webinar, “The goal is not to collect more ...

[tag-tec]Article marketing[/tag-tec] is not complete without using [tag-tec]autoresponders[/tag-tec]. You use article marketing to drive traffic to a website and to build yourself up as an authority. The main point here is you are doing this to sell more of your products or services.

Once you’ve written an article and you have driven the visitors to your resource box, you need to have them not just to visit your website. But to sign up to your list so you can follow up with them.

To make them sign up to your newsletter or list, you need an attractive offer to encourage them to sign up. A newsletter promising to deliver weekly tips is not enough. Everyone’s doing them.

You need to create a short report which they can download. Something they are interested such as “How To Do Effective Article Marketing In 7 Days” for example. A 5 page PDF report will be sufficient in this case.

With your article marketing creating a stream of targeted visitors, they will see this report and cannot resist to sign up so they can download it. After that your autoresponder kicks in.

Your autoresponder should be planned well in advance so that you have messages which can follow up with your subscribers every week. David DeAngelo has autoresponders following up with his subscribers for years. And he’s got a $20 Million per year business from it.

Many people seem to concentrate on the Bum Marketing technique which is why they are doing article marketing. The problem is, you need to work non-stop to make a living with Bum Marketing. The answer to this problem is to make the visitors sign up to your list and email them weekly with sound advice  and affiliate program offers.

Using article marketing Strategies with autoresponders, you are building a business and not working for quick cash.

Article Marketing ghostwriters are in demand. They create content which all internet marketer wants for search engine domination.

If you want to earn money online fast then you can become an article marketing ghostwriter and instantly have someone willing to pay you.

There is a slight problem though. Internet marketers or other people that want articles written, wants to pay a few dollars only per article.

Believe it or not, I’ve just found an article marketing ghostwriter that charges $2 per 500 word article.

I was over the moon.

I quickly gave them some work to test them and held my breath.

Two day later, they delivered all 20 articles. Holy cow, these article ghostwriters are really efficient.

BOOM!

My hopes exploded within 3 minutes. The articles were totally crap. They were stuffed with keywords all over the place – not for humans to read.

It did make me laugh though. “I will offer self improvement advice for you can should listen to heart”. HELP…STOP IT!

Wonder why no one recommends article marketing ghostwriters that are cheap and good?

‘Cause these people are like gold for your business. Want to share your gold?

To learn how to write articles yourseif or to teach your staff, download a copy of Article Marketing Strategies at http://www.trafficbeast.com/AMS